It was where he gave the dream up, over and over, freshly, every Saturday.

He looked at the bike not the way a child looks at a wish but the way a person looks at a thing they have chosen to sacrifice, one more time, and I had walked past that window beside him a dozen times and seen a boy wanting a toy, and never once seen the actual thing that was happening, which was a child, every week, choosing his mother’s home over his own heart.

Chapter 22 — The Footbridge by the Creek

“Then what happened today?” I asked, and my voice was shaking now, and I pointed at the torn sleeve, the scrape on his cheek, the mud that had never come from any innocent slip.